Patients with damage to certain parts of the right parietal cortex show a condition called neglect, in which they are systematically unaware of stimuli in the left side of space. The deficit is much more profound than a simple 'blind spot'; neglect patients may fail to notice objects, hear sounds, or feel touch on their left, and they are often unaware of the left half of individual objects, as revealed in the copied drawing below. They typically fail to acknowledge their disabilities, and think no more of their lack of awareness on the left than does a normal person about seeing nothing behind their head. On page 17 of this issue https://doi.org/www.nature.com/articles/nn0598_17, Driver & Mattingley review the literature on visual neglect; they discuss how the human clinical data may be related to physiological findings in the monkey parietal cortex, and they argue that the parietal cortex plays a key role in mediating visual awareness.